Tag Archives: Faye Dunaway

Thirty years ago I was watching an Ancient Lives episode, Egyptologist John Romer‘s series from the early 1980’s. (The only television my wife and I seemed to watch back then were documentaries). Remarkable series, never seen one like it. He was standing in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings and behind him was this magnificent painting wall painting. The artist, he showed us, had painted the outline of the figure of a man (or was it a god?) in one continuous sweeping stroke, twelve feet long. It wasn’t a straight line, but a lifelike line, curving, gently undulating, utterly ungeometric. Then he pointed out that all the paintings were like that, beginning as immensely long single strokes, perfect. All the artists painting the tombs did the same. In whatever schools they taught tomb painting back then, they taught this patient, focused technique. And, Romer said, we can’t do that now. Not with such ease. I watched a detailer draw a line across my car in a body shop once, one long continuous stroke. It was exquisite. One long, focused, flawless stroke. But could he have taken that brush, dipped it in paint, and swept across a wall in one long stroke, curving, undulating, unerring, a perfect outline of the figure to be filled in afterward? I’m not sure, but I doubt it. Our art is grounded in Greek sculpture and Roman mosaics, I think, infinite details, a zillion tiny steps creating a whole. I can’t imagine one of those Egyptian artists would dig Monet. Theirs was a world of long, graceful, fluid lines. One endless, perfect, living stroke. And thirty years later I’m looking for an adjective that described that stroke. Or described the look of that stroke. I needed to compare a picture to a melody played on the trumpet. Nothing bebop and pointillistic, but a long graceful richly hued melody. Like the theme from Chinatown. I was looking at a still of Faye Dunaway, it was softly black and white, the light was low, her expression haunted, and it struck me that the still–a portrait, really–looked like the trumpet playing the theme sounded. So I began to write that and halfway through the sentence suddenly needed a term that described those long seamless ancient Egyptian strokes. Because that is what her outline was, that’s what would nail it descriptively. An adjective that could apply to both a painting of Ra and a photo of Faye Dunaway. I needed that adjective. I began with soft but it wasn’t soft. It wasn’t firm either. It was —–. I was stuck. There isn’t one. There’s no such word. And no wonder, the very concept of the impression made on us by seeing a shape made by one long stroke like that doesn’t exist. And if it weren’t for John Romer it never would have occurred to me that such a thing even existed, and I wouldn’t have wasted an hour trying to look for a fucking adjective describing it. Hell, I couldn’t even describe it here, this is a mess, I’m flailing about trying to describe something that can’t be described in English. Romer had the visual, he followed the line with his finger and loving camera. We could see it on the screen, and visuals, even after four thousand years of writing and a hundred thousand years of speech comes nowhere near the effectiveness of the eye. Even something as rich in vocabulary and concepts as English, packed as it is with the borrowed lexicons of several languages and bits and pieces of a hundred others, is struck dumb by things it doesn’t even know exists. That skill John Romer marveled at defies my ability to describe without elaborate description. So the Chinatown piece sits unfinished, awaiting one non-existent word, and instead out gushed this. My kingdom for a word.

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My latest writing at: Brick's Picks

Eddie Money was punk rock to me. Or was that Meat Loaf. Yeah, Meat Loaf. Eddie Money was Meat Loaf to me, but also punk rock. No, that was the Ramones. The Ramones were punk rock to me, Eddie Money was Meat Loaf to me, and Meat Loaf was, I dunno, maybe Pat Benatar. Anyway, […]

“Look! I don’t like to get pushed around! I don’t like people I like to be pushed around! I don’t like anybody to get pushed around!” That was Sam Masterson, played by Van Heflin at his peak, in the noir classic The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946). It’s a startling, electrifying line for a […]

My latest writing at: Brick's Politics

Trump’s endlessly bizarre behavior at G7 makes perfect sense if he has Alzheimer’s. He didn’t lie about those calls from China. He thought they had occurred. I wonder how often this is happening. My guess is daily. Soon he’ll be seeing people who are not there. He’s not making sense because he is descending into […]

Letting Mueller play himself at the hearing was a terrible idea. George Clooney would have been a much better Robert Mueller. It’s all about the optics. Imagine Watergate without Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. WoodStein as WoodStein? Seriously? Nixon would still be President.

My latest writing at: Brick's History

[Found this forgotten in the drafts folder from 2018.] Was at Ralphs and checked out the poor people veggie bin and there were three big bundles of potatoes at 99 cents each. My Irish German heart was set aflutter and I bought all three and once home dropped them into the tuber bag with the […]

I haven’t seen this pointed out yet, but the reason that prime minister Boris Johnson was able to suspend Parliament legally is because Great Britain is a monarchy. It’s a parliamentary monarchy, sure, but it is first and foremost a monarchy and if the monarch says sure, suspend parliament, then that is the law. The […]

My latest writing at: Brick's Science

If you aren’t doing so already you might wanna set yourself up a WordPress blog (they’re free, but your own domain will cost $18/yr, about three slices of the San Francisco pizza you posted so eloquently about) and after you spill your essays onto Facebook you can cut and paste them onto your blog. Instant […]

If the birth control pill hadn’t been invented the year I was born think of how many more of you there would be. Look around. Double the numbers of middle aged people you see. Quadruple the number of twenty somethings. Octuple the children. The pill took care of that excess. Incidentally, the peak year for […]

My latest writing at: Brick's Brain

Not going to delete the blogs, tho’ I’d love to. It’s not the solution, tho’ it seemed like a great terrible idea at the time. Seriously, I was all ready to get rid of 90% of everything I’d ever written to reduce clutter. How’s that for a revolutionary act? The Pol Pol approach to website […]

As part of my excruciatingly dull mellow epileptic lifestyle I had to cut off contact with some people who, through no fault of their own, were really bad for my epilepsy. Just too intense, too volatile. I never told them. I just sort of slipped away. Now I’m having to do the same on Facebook, […]